Postcard Passion
From documenting the momentous to the mundane, postcards have served as a means of communicating thoughts, feelings and opinions since they were popularized in 1869, when the Austrian Postal Administration authorized the world’s first Correspondz Karte.
Postcards of today are most often sent to offer salutations of a trip or vacation, purchased for 50 cents or a buck at tourist shops. Vintage ones are often locked away in musty trunks in the attic or discarded boxes in the basement, masking a rich legacy that lingers just beneath the surface.
“I call them ‘the universe in microcosm,’” said Rod Kennedy, president of the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City, the oldest continuously operated club of its kind in the United States, founded in 1946.
Early postcards — correspondence cards — were the brainchild of Dr. Emanuel Herrmann, an Austrian national economist who fancied that postcards could be an inexpensive way for soldiers to correspond with loved ones back home during the Franco-Prussian War.
In 1861, John P. Charlton invented and patented the private postal card. He sold his copyright to H. L. Lipman, who then released the Lipman’s Postal Card, a
